The basis of any form of animation is the Pre-production stage. But for the purpose of this post I’ll limit it to 3D animation.
Depending on what you are planing to animate you must always have and idea planned out whether it be a short film or all the way to a feature length film. With an idea you must also have characters and/or objects in mind that you want to be moving within the piece. But be mindful that your first design of a character can change either drastically or can have minimal changes. Like for example Maui from Disney’s most recent film Moana, the characters’ design changed quite a bit throughout the pre-production stage, as in the earlier sketches he was bald.
Once you do finalize the designs for your characters it is time for the storyboards as they will help you translate the story from words into one of the first steps of animation. But your first set of storyboards are better off being drawn slightly messy as you will clean them up later on in the process.
The storyboards also help map out the scene and show how the characters and/or props are moving as shown here in the example above which is a set of storyboards from the cartoon Steven Universe.
Once your storyboards are finished you can start to polish them and turn them into animatics which can feature music and/ or prerecorded dialogue to show the soul and feel of the scene or film. Also around this time is the time you also create your 3D models.
Anyway this is starting to sound like a tutorial and I know very little about 3D animation….. But as I was trying to say the pre-production stage is the most crucial as it is the beginnings of your animation project, whether it be traditional 2D animation or the slightly new 3D animation.
3D ANIMATION
The modelling is one of the crucial parts of 3D animation as it creates the groundwork for solid 3D model foundation. There are 3 types for 3D modelling; Props, Characters & Background elements; with most 3D animations there is the use of polygonal modeling. “In polygonal modeling, an artist creates a digital representation of a 3D object with a geometric mesh composed of faces, edges, and vertices.” (Slick, P.3, 2016). Polygons are usually represented by triangles but polygons can also be represented by rectangles or squares. Another form of creating 3D models would be to fully sculpt the character, prop or background elements to give a different sort of feel to it all.
As shown in the image above the increase in polygons gives a higher quality result to the model. For example there is more polygons added to the face, hat, mask and arms of the model giving it more detail. The use of the vertices, edges and faces in the polygons help to form shapes of the model. This also determines the way the look of the model is shown. The process is now at its final stages of creation and it’s at this point the model should be refined and ready for UV mapping and texturing.
Chiara Tallarico 